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Re-Inscribing the Mother within Motherhood: A Feminist Reading of Shauna Singh
Baldwins Short Story Naina

Basudhara Roy
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Karim City College
Jamshedpur

The fetus in utero has become a metaphor for "man" in space, floating free, attached only by the
umbilical cord to the spaceship. But where is the mother in that metaphor? She has become an
empty space. (Katz-Rothman, 1986: 114)
Katz-Rothmans concern over the articulation and revelation of the silenced and invisible mother
within motherhood discourse has, ever since Rich, been a pivotal agenda in feminist thought.
Adrienne Rich, in her path-breaking work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution (1976) was the first to identify the two aspects allied within the concept of
motherhood motherhood as an institutionalized patriarchal narrative, emphasizing maternity as
the biological destiny of women and therefore responsible for the ghettoisation and degradation
of female potentialities and motherhood as a subjective female experience of empowerment and
fulfillment. Feminists since Rich have taken up this theoretical framework and used it to
emphasize on the one hand, the institution of motherhood as a male-defined site of oppression
and on the other as a positive force which can go a long way in restructuring female identity,
unleashing creativity and in establishing strong female ties in society. Using Foucaults ideas that
ideology works through disciplinary power (Foucault, 1997) by monitoring and controlling
bodily movements, processes and capacities

(Sawicki, 1999, cited by Conlon and Carvalho),
feminists have pointed out how patriarchy attempts to naturalize and therefore trivialize
motherhood by suppressing maternal subjectivity:
the maternal from the mothers perspective has been stifled because
motherhood is considered obvious and trivial from patriarchal and supposedly more enlightened
points of view. Paradoxically, yet in fact holding the same status, motherhood is too obvious in
the sense of being too visible, too seen, and thus turned into the obscene. (Liss, 2009: xvi)
They also identify patriarchal containing, controlling and regulation of the mother through
enmeshment the phenomenon of motherhood within a host of patriarchal mini-narratives which
overwrite, undo or dismiss experiential maternal accounts:
Birth experience is articulated through pre-existing medical, social and cultural narratives that
are reformulated, transformed and eventually shattered through embodied experience (Maher
and Souter, 2002, cited by Chadwick)
This ideology is in fact so pervasive that women, even in their own birth-narratives, tend to cast
their birthing experiences in patriarchal terms. Chadwick points out on the basis of research
evidence that women constantly privilege the outsiders view of their birth over their own
concrete bodily experience with the result that real birth is often seen as located within this
outsiders perspective and becomes more real for those with the outsider gaze than those with
the lived bodily experience of it. (Chadwick) Feminists, therefore, call for alternative woman-
centered maternity narratives in order to re-inscribe woman within the domain of her own
biology in terms which challenge the hegemonic phallogocentric maternity narrative. The French
Feminists- Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray are especially one in their idea of locating an
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empowered female identity and reservoirs of female creativity within the site of maternal
experience and the maternal body. They contend against traditional Freudian psychoanalytic
theory which fixes motherhood firmly within the structure of male dependence and dominance
by interpreting it as the fulfillment of the oedipal desire to bear a child by the father and
emphasize the need to bring the devalued umbilical relationship to the centre of motherhood
discourse.
Shauna Singh Baldwins short story Naina which this paper attempts to read in terms of a
feminist discourse on motherhood, was first published in the Priarie Fire magazine in Canada in
June 2000 and won the third prize in its competition. Re-published in 2004 in the Harper Collins
Book of New Indian Fiction and included in her 2007 volume of short stories We are not in
Pakistan, Naina narrates a magic-realistic tale of Naina, an Indian girl brought up in Canada who
solitarily undergoes the experience of motherhood out of wedlock, both her Canadian lover and
her patriarchal, conservative Indian family having deserted her, and carries her child within her
womb for fourteen years, refusing medical assistance of every kind till she is cajoled by her
doctor into a session of hypnotherapy which finally occasions her delivery. This paper proceeds
with the hypothesis that Nainas inability to come to terms with her maternal status and give
birth to her child owes itself to her internalization of the patriarchal ideas associated with
motherhood. Her mental stasis, her abandonment of all control over life and her persistent
questioning:
Who sent you baby? Where shall I deliver you?(p.180)
and
When I know who sent you baby, then Ill know to whom I
must deliver you. But till then, you stay with me, achcha?(p.177)
point to her misgivings and fears associated with the social gaze of unwed motherhood which
implicitly brings to our mind its whole discourse from its classification as deviant female
behavior to its current legal but stigmatized status. Unwed motherhood is socially identified as a
purely female transgression for there is no deviance labeling of unwed fathers, (Moorman,
1998: 34) and the female is looked upon as the sole impetus and victim of her own crisis (Rolfe,
2001). However the hypnotic conversation that Naina has with her unborn daughter becomes
crucial in enabling her to re-assess her status and identity in terms of her own subjectivity and by
liberating her from male ideological domination, it brings about Nainas birthing and her active
re-engagement with life.
This paper attempts to look at Nainas experience of motherhood as a deconstruction of the
patriarchal maternity narrative and an attempt to reclaim the subject-position of the mother
through four paradigms:
1) Dependence/Independence of motherhood from the father
2) Paternal authority over the maternal subject
3) Mother-Daughter relationship
4) Linking Gestation and Creativity


Dependence/Independence of motherhood from the father:
Patriarchal discourse seeks to centralize the father in all patterns of organization, conduct and
behavior. Within the institution of motherhood too, the father remains dominant since the woman
is forever Beauvoirs Other and can be recognized as wife or mother only with reference to
him. Katz-Rothman points out that since patriarchy privileges kinship bonds fostered only
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through paternal succession in the name of the father, the blood tie (nature) gets more privileged
than social relationship (nurture) (Rothman, 2000). Seen in this biological context, the mothers
body becomes a passive object impregnated by the life-seed of the father, and the child, a
triumph of male fertility. Motherhood within marriage, in acceptance of patriarchal codes,
therefore, reinforces patriarchy. Unwed mothers, however,
violate dominant patriarchal ideals of family, sexuality and motherhood through their
achievement of conception and maternity outside of marriage (Wegar,1997, cited by Peitsch)
and are therefore either disguised by constructed religious narratives or branded as samples of
deviant and immoral female behavior. In Naina, however, the patriarchal myth of the
dependence of motherhood on the father is subverted by the negotiation between Naina and her
unborn daughter. Nainas fears pertaining to her unwed motherhood are not her daughters for
the postmodern foetus recognizes her life as independent of the absent father. Living in her
mothers womb for several years, the child knows her mother intimately but the father is
relegated to the margin and remains unspoken about. The child does not acknowledge any
dependence on a father - she is sent by the Unknown and desires to be delivered to life and to the
world. The idea of the father as progenitor and therefore, owner of the offspring, is dismissed
here altogether. Nainas preoccupations with the sender and receiver of her child are thus
dissolved as the foetus dissociates itself from all ideological ties with the father, and as the
mother and child unite to affirm a life and identity independent of the father, a new feminist
discourse of motherhood is established.

Paternal authority over the maternal subject:
Feminists have, for long, identified and resented patriarchal attempts to control and regulate the
maternal body through technological and pathological means. The colonization of the womb by
patriarchy has led to its identification as dominated space, which is to say a space transformed
and mediated by technology.(Lefebvre, 1994: 164). It has been pointed out that one of the main
principles and effects of the ideology of technology is neutrality:
Technology as a neutral event produces the segmentation of space and blinds the relationship
between space and its contents. Consider the use, and images, of ultrasound screening in
pregnancy wherein the body of the mother is considered completely isolated from that of the
baby. (Conlon and Carvalho)
In Naina, the over-pathologization of reproductive experience is challenged by the
protagonists rejection of all medical assistance in bringing her child to birth. Ever since her
fullness began, Naina has known the foetus in her womb to be a girl. She does not need the
doctors reports pieces of sky collaged to black plastic (p 174) to prove it. Her firm refusal of a
Caesarean birth overriding the prescriptions of the medical fraternity and her insistence on her
daughter coming when she is ready to be born show Nainas assertion of control over her
maternity. I am not a case, (p. 174) she repeatedly lashes out as her strange pregnancy catches
medical attention through medical journals and tabloids. While the doctors are baffled at the
failure of all medical techniques on her unharmed fourteen-year pregnancy case, Naina herself
is sure of her birthing once her queries as to the sender and receiver of her child are pacified, a
birthing which eventually does take place. Again, Nainas experience of childbirth by
emphasizing on it as an active and powerful, physical and emotional process challenges
patriarchal notions of it as a purely passive, biological, animal event - I too worked all
night, (p. 185) she tells Celeste. Further, by giving birth all alone at home through an
unwitnessed private labour labour that was joy and joy that was labour (p. 184), Naina
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reclaims the centrality of the mother within the process of childbirth and attains to the semiotic
experience of Jouissance which according to Kristeva and Irigaray makes motherhood a source
of enrichment and empowerment.
Mother-Daughter relationship:
Traditional Freudian psychoanalytic theory sets up an opposition between Mother and Daughter
caused by the Father. Freud states that at the Oedipal stage, the daughter experiences her first
lack of penis and blames the mother for it, thus moving away from the mother and towards the
father. Feminists, however look upon the mother-daughter relationship as central to the fostering
of close female bonds in society. Irigaray argues for a rebuilding of the mother-daughter
relationship, the construction of a female genealogy and a woman-to-woman sociality. (Ed. Jon
Simons) She believes that :
Without a maternal genealogy the mother cannot transmit respected images of women whilst
the daughter can only see her mother in one of two ways: 1) as an omnipotent phallic mother
whom she must flee in order to retain some autonomy or: 2) as a castrated mother to whom she
does not wish to turn, turning instead towards the father (Irigaray, cited in Simons)

In Naina, we come across an intimate mother-daughter bonding for Naina and her unborn
daughter share the umbilical relationship for fourteen years without injury to either. Not only
does Nainas awareness of her daughter not require medical confirmation:
she was sure it was a girl. Only a girl could be so comfortable in her mothers womb so that
coming out and needing to grow would spoil her world. (p. 174)
which places their relation within the realm of Kristevas Semiotic, but the texts statement
Naina had talked to the babyso many yearsthat if the baby hadnt been a girl before she
took residence in Nainas womb, she surely became one (p.174)
points at the maternal desire to foster and perpetuate female bonding through a daughter. Also
within the magic-realist framework of the story, it is the daughter who brings about the mothers
ideological liberation from patriarchy by opting for an identity independent of the father and
leads to Nainas re-assessment of her motherhood in the sense of procreating (creating ones
own) rather than of delivering (transmitting without ownership). The story, thus, privileges the
mother-daughter bonding and by emphasizing the reconstruction of maternal identity through the
daughter, works towards the recovery of what Irigaray calls the feminine symbolic against
patriarchal symbolism.
Linking Gestation and Creativity:
The use of gestation metaphors in descriptions of creativity has been quite common even in male
creative writing but feminist theorists like Cixous in her concept of ecriture feminine and
Irigaray, in her insistence on writing the mother have emphasized the special relationship
between female biology and female creativity. In Naina, the text draws a remarkable parallel
between gestation and artistic creation, - the birthing of Nainas daughter and the completion of
Celestes sculpture, her babe, are both aspects of female creation and the womens
understanding of each other is implicit. Nainas fourteen-year pregnancy may shock and puzzle
the medical fraternity and Dr. Johnson who is located within it but Celeste is well aware of the
mystery of the creative process:
Some things, they take years. This one, I work on now - a lifetime. A lifetime it take me. I try
and I try, mais (p. 176)
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Celestes art, it is told, is realist, and recreating life is a mysterious and long-drawn out process.
Finally, Nainas child and Celestes art are born in the same night, both out of joyful labour
which reaffirms the link between maternity and creativity.
Irigray laments:
the phallic penis takes back from the mother the power to give birth, to nourish, to dwell and
to centre. The Phallus erected where once there was an umbilical chord? It becomes the
organizer of the world. (cited in Simons)
In Naina, however, the Phallus is replaced with the umbilical cord which sustains and nourishes,
independent of paternal control, for a period of fourteen years to the utter bafflement of the
technological and medical institutions of patriarchy. The Naina that the end of the story leaves us
with is a confident mother, aware of her own potentialities, her empowered identity and assertive
of her position in society. She no longer needs to fear countenancing her Family or Stanford
(both being agents of patriarchy in her life) for she has achieved the joyful state of motherhood
without their help and her daughter desires no other identity than that which her physical coming
to birth will give her. Baldwins tale, therefore, ends in a triumphant celebration, reclamation and
repositioning of the silenced and marginalized mother within the narrative of motherhood and by
its establishment of a matrifocal family unit through a firm mother-daughter bond, the story
envisages an enlightened feminist future.

Primary Source:
Singh, Khushwant, ed. The Harper Collins Book of New Indian Fiction. (New Delhi: Harper
Collins Publishers India, 2005). All references to page nos. are to this edition and are cited
parenthetically.
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Hurley et al. New York: The New York Press, 1994.
Sawicki, J. "Disciplining Mothers: Feminism and the New Reproductive Technologies."
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